Did you also experience real glitches damaging game experience ? On my side, a few turns after a reload, something gets odd with number calculations.
This is how I left the game (after a fairly long session):
After a reload, my happiness counts remains as it is there for a few seconds, then updates to this:
If you review the bookkeeping here, the second screen has it right. In the first one, the game apparently let me go into massive unhappiness, as a substantial amount of unhappiness is not taken into account, for some reason. Note also that, in the first screen, playing on King, I get 14 happiness from difficulty level.
Additionally, I found myself able to build more than 3 Writers' Guilds after a few turns into the game, but I didn't pay attention, until sh*t happened as you can see...